Essy

⚠️ 🚧 This project is still pre-v1 and not meant to be easily installable yet.

Easy Static Site Hoster (ESSH, spoken "Essy")

A personal site hosting platform, where you'd need nothing more than a web server, a browser, and some HTML coding skills, to create your own personal website.

Essy works with a reverse proxy, pointing it at the files and folders that you uploaded, and manages the rest for you :3

Roadmap

v1

The first major release, meant to focus on the core functionality of editing static websites.

• 0.1: MVP
  • Basic utility, such as defining domains, and uploading files
• 1.0: "Usable"
  • Fool-hardening by checking common problems such as DNS and nginx configuration
  • Automatic TLS certificate management
  • A browser code editor
  • Easy installation
  • Security hardening via an isolated component (as nginx reloads require root permission)
• 1.1: Live Editing Preview
  • Have the browser code editor support live previews, before committing/saving to the site proper
• 1.2: Multi-user
  • Allowing multiple users to login to the same instance
  • A split between administrators and users
  • Sharing of domain ownership between users

v2

A second major release adding more extendability, completely optional.

• 2.0: Extensions
  • Support static site generators as optional extensions, able to be installed/toggled per domain
  • Code editor will point to setup files of the extension
• 2.1: Tweaks
  • Allow "tweaking" the output of static site generators
  • These "tweaks" are stored as (HTML) diffs, which are then re-applied on every output
  • All-or-nothing: Tweaks apply, or output is not applied to the site (Disable/fix the tweak to let it pass)

Anti-commitments

At the moment, we are not focusing on features like the following;

• Enterprise Support
  • Essy is meant to be for personal use, while businesses and such could technically use it, we will not focus on supporting features relevant to it (SSO, group management, etc.)

Maintenance Brief

From Jo (@ShadowJonathan):

While I want to create Essy, I don't want to be a long-term intensive maintainer of it. Maintenance (after v1 or v2) should be low-energy for me, hands-off, so I can allocate energy elsewhere for other projects.

I'll put my energy into creating v1 and possibly also v2, but after that, there'll have to be a shift in expectations; either I'll be more absent and development will be slower, or someone else will do maintenance for me, or this'll be maintained/owned by some other group.

I don't intend to make money off of this, neither do I intend for this to be ever a money-generating revenue; the entire point is play and experimentation. So don't expect me to sell it, or whatever that would mean for an Open Source Project.